Forums → Art, Music, and Writing → Pale (a story for my friends at the Zombie Survival Club)

"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."
Revelation 6:8


Soft tapping on the window beside me. My eyes snap open, a sharp intake of breath as panic instantly grips me, wrapping around my chest like a cold vice. My heart hammers loudly, I lay frozen. Quickly waking from the recesses of my troubled sleep, my mind assesses the danger, seeking the source of my fear.
Rain...soft rain tilted just so, pattering on the pane like eager fingers. The vice slowly melts, the hammering in my chest slows, allowing me to breathe once again, --to recognise my surroundings as familiar.
My hand steals slowly off of the mattress pad that I'm lying on, wheelframe long ago discarded for silence, and rests on the familiar grip of my pistol. Wrapping my fingers around it, I pull it to me and hold it to my chest, its coolness comforting me. My eyes adjust to the darkness, identifying the props of the ceiling fan above me. I think for a moment on how long it's remained motionless, stilled since the power died...since everything died.
With a soft sigh, I pull myself upright, my pistol still cradled against me, then falling into my lap as I slowly run my hands over my face. I feel the bags under my eyes, the wrinkles in the corners of my mouth and forehead. It feels old, my skin rough and caked with a fine layer of dinge and old sweat. So much for my youthful twenties, I think to myself with a tight-lipped smile. Water is such a precious commodity these days, the buckets on the roof providing barely any relief from thirst, let alone bodily odors. Not that there's really any need to bathe.
I stand now, gripping my pistol, quietly moving in the gloom, across the bedroom and into the adjoining bathroom. Laying the pistol carefully in the sink, I slide a plastic bucket under me, squatting with one hand propped on the bathtub ledge, relieving myself with practiced indignity. Finished, I hitch my jeans up and slide the bucket back behind the toilet.
Sitting on the bathtub ledge, I slide a hand down the inside of the tub, feeling for the water height. Just under half full. Enough for a few more weeks, with caution. Cupping my hand, I bring the water to my mouth, sipping, then run my hand over my face, releshing the cool moisture.
I look around me, at the darkness of the house. I wonder what time it might be, the clocks having stopped weeks ago. I shake my head at such thoughts. Time doesn't matter anymore. Light equals day, darkness equals night and both don't belong to me anymore. All I own now is my life, --survival my unwanted hobby, my forced occupation.
God, how did it come to this? I've forced my mind over that question over and over, the broken record of my brain turning the possibilities inside and out.
I think back to the days before the darkness, before they came. No one paid attention to the rumors, --isolated reports springing up in the tabloids, then later on the footnotes of internet news. A virus, some sort of flu named 'Goliath' of all things, that made its victims mad with fever, blood boiling in their heads, --a fist-sized lump finally building on the brain, cracking their skulls like eggshells. Another new flu, born halfway around the world? We dismissed it with a collective shrug and a jab of the remote.
American media...so very efficient at downplaying and minimizing international reports of people collapsing in the streets of Bangkok, convulsing in offices and homes in Baghdad, projectile vomiting blood and mucus in the churches, police stations and hospitals of Johannesburg. The CDC calmly oreassuring the public that the grainy, bootleg videos streaming out of Berlin, London and Tokyo showing shaky images of people clawing open their shirts, scratching deep red ruts in their chests as thick blood and dark globs spewed out of their mouths, noses and eyes were utter fabrications. YouTube videos going viral, then disappearing from the net. Blogs springing up casting theories and conspiracies, only to be shut down, labeled "Terroristic in nature". Vaccines needled into crying children in front of lines of anxious parents...and yet, we dismissed every dam*ned word of it. Why? The why is simple...arrogance.
We buried it because of what was said about Goliaths inevitable conclusion, the evolutionary peak of its infection on its victims. Not the reports of a horrific death, mind you, oh no. That part, in fact, was actually sensationalized, snatched and chewed up by media dogs and network on-the-scene reporters and regurgitated back to the American public in the form of sterilized "Comprehensive Reports." Photos of bloodstained gurneys, trucks piled high with trussed-up corpses, --("...What you are about to see you may find disturbing...&quot, the oily black smoke billowing from human bonfires. It wasn't until they attempted to capture video of the rest of the stories that the real censoring began. Journalists cut off in mid-sentence as the cameras swung toward shrieking bystanders, the gunshots of police and soldiers, the twitching within the piles of the dead. We were assured that increasingly frequent reports of American Goliath flu victims staggering to their unsteady feet, slack-jawed and shuddering, were fabrications of internet-addicted fearmongers and terrorists. I remember watching the Secretary of Defense chuckle and shake his head during a press conference at the very notion that corpses were rising up and turning on the living, biting and consuming their flesh. We, in our armchairs, the AC blowing in our faces and lights on in every room, ate our microwave popcorn and sighed in relief. Everything would be alright, we were assured. The military and local law enforcement were handling the situation. We were in control, they said, and we swallowed that pill without even asking for a glass of water.
I get up from the bathtubs edge, the numbness in my bum slowly receeding as i reclaim my pistol and softly make my way out of the bedroom and through the dark halls of my home.
Rooms seem enormous in the gloom, devoid of the furniture that now lies piled up in front of the doors and windows. I step into the living room, the grimy carpeting masking my steps as I head to a window, the sprinkle of the rain outside patting small blots on its surface. I tenatively pull back the thin curtains and peer through the boards, nailed securely to the windowframe, into the night. The street is dark, barely visible without moonlight, the carnage of my neighborhood hidden gratefully from my view.
Just then, I hitch my breath. A form slowly shambles into my view out of the blanket of light rain, just barely within the limits of my vision. At first, I see only a human frame outlined, shoulders slumped as if in defeat. As it moves into better view, I see its head jutting forward, then twitching sharply from left to right, as if bieng pulled, neck bones popping outward from the effort. It moves closer into my vision on stiff legs, the occasional twitch causing it to stagger, then regain balance as it walks. I can now see the clothes, drenched through with rain and dryrot, bleached from the sun. A t-shirt, torn and ragged, completely coated in the front with the caked, dark blood of its first demise. Sweat bottoms ripped and sagging, stained also from the blood and feces it expelled in the final convulsive moments of its human life. Its arms twitch, hands clenching and unclenching at its sides as it moves a bit closer into my view. My mind begins to race, anxiety welling up as I watch its jerky approach. I know that though its eyes, white and bulging impossibly out of their sockets, cannot see me, its hearing is excellent even in the white noise of rainfall. I see the slack jaws, the chin hidden under dried blood, the strings of sinew and rotting flesh caught in-between broken, jagged teeth. I see the bulging forehead, incredibly large, jutting over its now hidden eyebrows like a grapefruit, the skin split open, showing the white glint of skull. It stops walking, close to the window now. It stands, mottled grey-skinned body jerking occasionally as if shocked, the jaw now slowly working up and down, the head and limbs twitching. I imagine that I can hear its soft moans and hisses, the burps and farts of escaping gas from the rotted meat in its bloated belly and intestines. Slowly, it turns and finally lurches slowly away, back into the darkness.
This is what they didn't want us to see. This is what we were in "control" of. We believed...we had no reason not to. We believed until their lies came crashing down around us, the naked festering truth crashing through the paper walls of our lives, shattering the security pipedream we had talked ourselves into. We believed, even through the gunshots and explosions merely blocks away. We believed in spite of the screams of our neighbors and the startled wailing of car alarms. We believed that the snow on the tv, then total loss of power was temporary. I actually even still believed as Rex was barking madly outside and my husband walked into the room with his pistol, usually locked up in the closet. It wasn't until after I helped him move the furniture in front of the doors and I looked out the window I'm at now that truth reared its head and took Mrs. Tentlach on my front lawn. I saw her get dragged down, her screams intensifying as they tore into her belly, ripping out purple loops of innards, tearing into her face, neck, legs, --blood fountaining from ravaged arteries. I watched as they feasted...watched as my world changed before my eyes with gnashing teeth and clawed hands.
I move from the window, wiping away a tear with my sleeve. I steal into the kitchen, sitting carefully on the floor in the midst of discarded cans and wrappers. I peer into some of the cans, probing them with my fingers, knowing that their contents have long since gone. I sigh, mentally forcing my hunger away. Lately, its been much harder to stave it off. John had all of the plans, he was my final scrap of belief. He knew to fill the tub and sink with water. He knew to put the buckets on the roof. He knew to re-enforce the windows and doors. He rationed the food, pulled guard as I slept. He knew he was growing weak, keeping me strong. He also knew how to leave, with a single gunshot to his temple on the roof. He didn't take me, though. He should've taken me...
Now I wander the house, eating a little, sleeping a little and watching them a lot. I see the reanimated corpses of neighbors turned long ago, wandering the neighborhood. I see the decayed corpse of Rex, still tied to a tree in the backyard, but I try not to look at him long, --it makes me drool. I watch the water slowly receeding from the tub, the buckets gathering so very little. I see John...his remains in the kitchen where I gathered him in desperation, keeping me fed a bit longer, when I can stomach it. I see the pistol in my hand, taunting me, showing me the way out.

I see the world. It is pale.